American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) Hosts WindPower 2017

I have a strange and wonderful emotional reaction whenever I attend the huge conferences for solar and wind.  At yesterday’s ginormous WindPower 2017 event, for instance, I could feel my chest swelling with pride as I walked around the main floor, immersed in an ever-expanding sea of product innovation that is leading to a clean energy future of all humankind. 

Spread out over more than one million square feet of exhibitor space, there were literally thousands of note-worthy concepts associated with making wind safer, more affordable, and more capable of becoming an even larger component of our overall grid-mix.

There are, after all, things to which people rightfully object about wind.  But for every objection there is an equal and opposition solution somewhere in the works, and here are a few examples:

Objection: Noise.  Solution: blades made with noise abatement technology on the trailing edge.  (See photo above.)

Objection: Warning lights flashing all night.  Solution: FAA approved radar, turning on warning lights only when an aircraft is within three nautical miles and 1000 feet in altitude.

Objection: Bird strike.  Solution (and check this out!): Radar that identifies bird species according to size, speed, and behavior based on an enormous database in a constantly growing and improving neural network, which curtails wind turbines close to any endangered species, e.g., the golden eagle, and then alerts the control systems of neighboring wind farms in the direction of the bird’s flight path.

With wind, as with any form of energy, there is no such thing as a free lunch.  But the industry is working hard to eliminate any and all problems associated with its becoming dominant in our constellation of clean energy solutions.  We should all be proud of its achievements.